The third Design System Day of 2024 (#DSDay24) is happening this Thursday, on 28 November, and I’m very excited. My team and I are running it as a hackathon, which is a healthy change of pace from the structure of the other #DSDay24 events.
Running the first two conferences was fun, but they took a long time to plan. As with any large face-to-face event, there were logistical challenges and a significant amount of red-tape to get through. Running a smaller event, from a GDS office allows us to bypass a lot of this and put something together quickly.
Honestly, paperwork and approvals shouldn’t change the type of events we run, but the planning phases for this year’s #DSDay24 events stretched way longer than they needed to.
We re-assessed and updated our the design system’s community strategy recently. On reflection, we realised that the larger events have limited what we have been able to run for the community, and there is a sense we can deliver better value for the time invested. Delivering value for taxpayers’ money is the bottom-line at the end of the day, so a switch to a different way of doing things was necessary. Running smaller, more frequent events allow us to be more dynamic and responsive to the users’ needs.
Back to co-design
This situation is really timely, as I’ve been meaning to get back to creating things with the community. The co-design experiments I ran a few years ago were challenging and knotty, but allowed me to work directly with designers and developers across government and the public sector. This year has left me pining for some of that direct contact with the users our team serves.
#DSDay24 events thus far were community-led, and I worked with a lot of community members on the session format, content and themes. But essentially, our team provided a physical platform for the community to show off their skills and knowledge. All the heavy lifting was done by talented individuals, who are part of our community. All we did was create space for this brilliance to happen.
Right now, having sessions where we are more in control of the planning and can deliver to shorter timescales, seems a better fit. A variety of events has kept our user base interested over the past couple of years and we hope we can add some variety to this year too.
Organised chaos
We’re running the third Design System Day as a hack day. The theme is bringing the design systems in government closer together. This is something I’ve been talking about for a while now, but we haven’t had capacity on the team to prioritise this. I’m glad it’s something we can swarm on as a community, and get done collaboratively.
In the time since this has come up in community discussions (around a year), there are version of this that have sprung up in the wild.
It may seem like the topic has been dictated by the team, and that the community has had less input on topic. However, this was taken from our priority list from the Government Design System Assembly (board here), which is a collection of teams who run design systems in government. All of the members of this group are not only community members, but key stakeholders that the GOV.UK Design System is looking to foster relationships with.
The hack will be interactive on the day, with attendees expected to help shape the problem space and design solutions as well. The stages of the day have been planned: sharing user needs, ideation, feedback, and show and tell. However, user needs will be defined on the day, groups will be formed based on attendees’ priorities, and any output will be based on how people navigate the challenges on the day.
It could be chaos. But it will be exciting for sure.
I have run designathons and co-design sessions like this before. You can’t reliably estimate what kind of output you will get from a hack like this. But based on the plan, we will gain a bunch of user research, some prioritisation from the community, and a variety initial prototypes from a bunch of very talented designers. Which sounds like a very productive day to me.
We’ll see how it goes. The plan is to iterate the format and run a number of other hacks on different topics throughout the next year.